YouTube Now Serving More Than a Billion Views a Day

Chad Hurley, CEO and Co-founder of YouTube, today posted an item to the Official YouTube Blog with the criptic headline, "Y,000,000,000uTube."

He said, "Three years ago today, Steve and I stood out in front of our offices and jokingly crowned ourselves the burger kings of media." He added, "Today, I'm proud to say that we have been serving well over a billion views a day on YouTube."

According to comScore Video Metrix, 120.5 million Americans watched nearly 10 billion videos on YouTube.com in August 2009. That 82.6 videos per viewer a month.

According to comScore qSearch, Americans conducted 9.4 billion searches on Google in August 2009.

Yep, the numbers are right. There are more videos being watched on YouTube than there are searches being conducted on Google in the United States.

So, why is YouTube perhaps the most underrated marketing channel in the country?

Back on July 20, 2009, the YouTube Biz Blog did a little myth busting. I think the post provides insight into the reasons why the world's most popular online video community is the Rodney Dangerfield of marketing.

Myth 1: YouTube is limited to short-form user-generated content. YouTube has thousands of premium content partners, from Sony to Disney to Universal Music, and fans can find hundreds of full-length feature films and thousands of full-length TV episodes on YouTube. Hey, even Hulu has a channel on YouTube.

Myth 2: YouTube videos are grainy and of poor quality. YouTube launched HD videos less than a year ago and YouTube already has more HD videos than any other video site. Hundreds of thousands of HD videos are uploaded to the site every month, and tens of millions are viewed every day. Check out Where the Hell is Matt? (2008), if you need to see an example.

Myth 3: Traffic, growth, and uploads are bad for YouTube's bottom line. This may look like a threat to a Wall Street analyst, but it is a opportunity to a marketer. The truth is that all YouTube's infrastructure was built from scratch, which means models that use standard industry pricing are too high when it comes to bandwidth and similar costs. And marketers should focus on where their prospect are going day in and day out, not what keeps Wall Street analaysts up at night.

Myth 4: Advertisers are afraid of YouTube. You may be still be afraid, but more than 70% of Ad Age Top 100 marketers ran campaigns on YouTube in 2008. They're buying YouTube's home page, Promoted Videos, overlays, and in-stream ads. Many are organizing contests that encourage the uploading of user videos to their brand channels, or running advertising exclusively on popular user partner content. Watch my interview with YouTube Product Manager at SES New York about YouTube's Insight and Sponsored videos.

Myth 5: YouTube is only monetizing 3-5% of the site. This oft-cited statistic is old and wrong. Monetized views have more than tripled in the past year, as YouTube has added partner content very quickly and has done a better job of promoting their videos across the site.

If you want to learn more about the opportunity that YouTube represents, you can attend the session entitled, "YouTube & Video Optimization," at SES Chicago 2009.

About the author

Greg Jarboe is president of SEO-PR, which provides search engine optimization, public relations, video marketing, and social media marketing services. He's the author of "YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day," a faculty member at Rutgers University and Market Motive, as well as a frequent speaker at SES conferences.

If you use rich snippets to markup your videos, you may want to double check that Google is still showing them. Reports indicate a huge reduction – with estimates as high as 44 percent – in the number of video snippets from Google's search results.
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